After five years in Europe, striker Yura Movsisyan has come back to Real Salt Lake on loan from Spartak Moscow. The Armenian forward played a vital role in RSL's emergence as an elite MLS team and he returns during a period of transformation.

With three MLS titles in five seasons with the LA Galaxy and a scoring rate that seems to get better each year -- 20 goals in 24 games in 2015 to give him 73 goals in 108 MLS games -- Robbie Keane has had the best career of any big international star that has entered MLS since it implemented the Designated Player rule in 2007.

Perhaps no player on the Seattle Sounders knows better what Jordan Morris was facing in deciding whether he'll join the Sounders or Werder Bremen -- the German club says MLS has won out -- than Clint Dempsey.

Momentum for a move to Werder Bremen continues to build as Jordan Morris played his first game for the German club on Friday, starting and assisting on the lone goal in its 1-0 win over Inter Baku of Azerbaijan in a friendly game that wrapped up its winter camp in Turkey.

Seattle has made the playoff every year since joining MLS and has fallen short of MLS Cup every time. Changes in ownership and the front office are part of the job for technical director Chris Henderson, who has worked in the league continuously since it started up in 1996.

The only live broadcast coverage of the 2016 MLS SuperDraft from Baltimore Thursday will be streamed on the Internet, yet the absence of ESPN is a minor inconvenience as the league begins its third decade of play.

The journeys of our projected top 15 picks in Thursday's MLS SuperDraft have some commonalities. Many are excellent students. No. 1 Joshua Yaro, the son of Ghanaian school teachers, has a photographic memory. North Carolina has three players on our list, and Georgetown and Stanford have two apiece as their strong academics attract players not easily sidetracked by a risky career in pro career.

Seven veterans are not in the U.S. 23-man squad for the January camp but have been put on standby, a bizarre sidelight for a coach who can't seem to accept his own admission that this will be transitional year for the national team.

Just think about what has happened in the month since Portland beat Columbus in the 2015 MLS Cup final, and we won't include the announcements of Targeted Allocation Money and other league matters. Domestically and abroad, the game moves at a dizzying speed.

The first major event of the year for Major League Soccer is its annual draft. MLS has been holding college drafts since its first season -- the inaugural draft 20 years ago produced future Hall of Famer Eddie Pope and three current MLS head coaches, Jeff Cassar, Jesse Marsch and Greg Vanney -- but it has been calling it the SuperDraft since 2000.